“She pointed to the wreckage of one of the frigates in the distance. Half the ship had landed atop one of the towers on the edge of the city, the other half on the flatland beyond. “You didn’t…do that, did you?” He shrugged with proper dramatic flair. “I did say I came to rescue you. They were in my way.”
“Secrets, however long they are kept, usually still manage to be brought to light. The best you can hope for is that you’ll be in control of when a secret gets out, not if it does.” -Melody in CHIMERA-”
“As the sky began to darken she sank down in the chair. She had just watched over a thousand Alliance soldiers die in the space of less than a minute. Yet the encounter would be considered a victory, for the enemy was vanquished. But at such a cost. She considered what Alex had asked of her…and began to understand.”
“What s it like to be a living legend? A lot fucking better than being a dead one... Geordie Selwyn, Appetite for Corruption”
“Caleb!” The sharp, forceful tone demanded he halt. He found he had complied, but did not turn around. His voice sounded low and hoarse, likely because he couldn’t breathe. “Alex, I can’t.”
“There are many places that are not made for staying, Heckleck said. They are too harsh, too hard, and too far away from whatever you call home. You don t root where you don t have to, unless you re unluck.”
“Metaphorically, Tom said, if you take knowledge as light, and ignorance as dark, there does sometimes seem to be a real presence to the dark -- to ignorance. Something more tactile and muscley than just lack of knowledge. A sort of will to ignorance. It would explain some politicians.”
“There are some that even beg for the Chamber, she could hear Isaar saying in the back of her mind. Soft minded fools or broken souls that would rather live a fabricated existence than deal with reality.”
“(...)Through the ship s telescopes, he had watched the death of the solar system. With his own eyes, he had seen the volcanoes of Mars erupt for the first time in a billion years; Venus briefly naked as her atmosphere was blasted into space before she herself was consumed; the gas giants exploding into incandescent fireballs. But these were empty, meaningless spectacles compared with the tragedy of Earth. That, too, he had watched through the lenses of cameras that had survived a few minutes longer than the devoted men who had sacrificed the last moments of their lives to set them up. He had seen ... ... the Great Pyramid, glowing dully red before it slumped into a puddle of molten stone ... ... the floor of the Atlantic, baked rock-hard in seconds, before it was submerged again, by the lava gushing from the volcanoes of the Mid-ocean Rift... ... the Moon rising above the flaming forests of Brazil and now itself shining almost as brilliantly as had the Sun, on its last setting, only minutes before ... ... the continent of Antarctica emerging briefly after its long burial, as the kilometres of ancient ice were burned away ... ... the mighty central span of the Gibraltar Bridge, melting even as it slumped downward through the burning air ... In that last century the Earth was haunted with ghosts - not of the dead, but of those who now could never be born. For five hundred years the birthrate had been held at a level that would reduce the human population to a few millions when the end finally came. Whole cities - even countries - had been deserted as mankind huddled together for History s closing act.”
“Wit had conquered science by laughing it out of court.”
“One moment I was sitting in your ship feeling very depressed, and the next moment I was standing here feeling utterly miserable. An Improbability Field I expect.”
“Something was wrong with the devices themselves. Digging deep into the internal structure of the circuit boards with powerful microscopes, Simon s team had discovered broken and incorrect connections, electronic dead-ends, short circuits, and nonsensical pathways.”
“The unfortunate 8075 hadn t survived his assault, splintering apart, fragments of its casing skittering across the bench. The battery within had split along its plane, revealing something as out-of-place as a missile in a bathtub.”
“Perfection all the time would drive them mad. For every perfect little town, there s something ugly underneath. No dream without the nightmare.”
“Time is spent never bought. Minutes count when seconds blur. Memories are past that’s caught. Imaginings are future’s lure.” Cass and Silver Rainbow-”
“Slipstream – sorry, infernokrusher - takes a cut-throat razor to the hackneyed clichés of both strange and mundane genres. It cannibalises them, retrofits them, treats them the way Godzilla treats Tokyo, the Burroughs treats Interzone. Smash and grab. Cut up and fold in.”
“In Sneffels Yoculis craterem kem delibat umbra Scartaris Julii intra calendas descende, audas viator, et terrestre centrum attinges. kod feci. Arne Saknussem”